That Chamberlain is a strong Anti-Semite adds to the value of the testimony which he bears to the nobility of the Sephardim, the intensely aristocratic Jews of Spain and Portugal, the descendants of the men whom the Romans, dreading their influence, deported westward. "That is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech and in deportment.... That out of the midst of such men prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first glance -- something which I confess the closest observation of the many hundred 'Bochers' in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin had failed to enable me to do."

***

And we, who were chosen to develop the profoundest and sublimest religious conception of the world as the light, life and vitalising force of our whole culture, have with our own hands firmly tied up the veins of life and limp along like crippled Jewish slaves behind Jehovah's Ark of the Covenant!

***

It is not necessary to feel sympathy for the pseudo-Buddhistical sport of half-educated idlers in order to recognise clearly that the discovery of the divine doctrine of understanding of the ancient Indians is one of the greatest achievements of the nineteenth century, destined to exercise an enduring influence upon distant ages. To this has been added the knowledge of old Teutonic poetry and mythology. Everything that tends to strengthen genuine individuality is a real safety anchor. The brilliant series of Teutonic and Indian scholars has, half unconsciously, accomplished a great work at the right moment; now we too possess our "holy books," and what they teach is more beautiful and nobler than what the Old Testament sets forth...the myth of the peculiar aptitude of the Jew for religion is finally exploded.

***

I find it difficult to grow enthusiastic because the material element is so predominant in this century....Not ideas, but material gains, are the characteristic feature of the nineteenth century....And so this too great preoccupation with the material banished the beautiful almost entirely from life...If the nineteenth century were really a summit, then the pessimistic view of life would be the only justifiable one: to see, after all the great achievements in the intellectual and material spheres, bestial wickedness still so widespread, and misery increased a thousandfold, could cause us only to repeat Jean Jacques Rousseau's prayer: "Almighty God, deliver us from the sciences and the pernicious arts of our fathers! Grant us ignorance, innocence and poverty once more as the only things which can bring happiness and which are of value in Thine eyes!"...  It may be that the tendency of modern education to direct the glance so unceasingly to the past is regrettable, but it has the advantage that one does not require to be a Schiller to feel with him that "no single modern man can vie with the individual Athenian for the prize of manhood."  When, therefore, we look back at the nineteenth century, which certainly was driven more than it drove, and in most things deviated to an almost ridiculous extent from the paths it had originally intended to pursue, we cannot help feeling a thrill of honest admiration and almost of enthusiasm.

***

"THE WORLD," says Dr. Martin Luther, "is ruled by God through a few heroes and pre-eminent persons."...I make this statement in advance that the reader may comprehend in what sense the year 1 is here chosen as the starting-point of our age....The actual life of the hero is, and cannot but be, the living source of all subsequent developments. The birth of Jesus Christ is the most important date in the whole history of mankind...In a certain sense we might truly say that "history" in the real sense of the term only begins with the birth of Christ. The peoples that have not yet adopted Christianity -- the Chinese, the Indians, the Turks and others -- have all so far no true history; all they have is, on the one hand, a chronicle of ruling dynasties, butcheries and the like....The Aryan Indian, for example, though he unquestionably possesses the greatest talent for metaphysics of any people that ever lived, and is in this respect far superior to all peoples of to-day, does not advance beyond inner enlightenment: he does not shape; he is neither artist nor reformer, he is content to live calmly and to die redeemed -- he has no history.

***

Meanwhile, just as the day is followed by the night (the sacred night, which reveals to our eye the secret of other worlds, worlds above us in the firmament of heaven and worlds within ourselves, in the depths of our silent hearts), so the glorious positive work of the Greeks and Romans demanded a negative completion; and this was provided by Israel. To enable us to see the stars, the light of day must be extinguished; in order to become truly great, to attain that tragic greatness which, as I have said, alone gives vivid purport to history, man had to become conscious not only of his strength but also of his weakness. It was only by clear recognition and unsparing accentuation of the triviality of all human action, the pitiableness of reason in its heavenward flight, the general baseness of human feelings and political motives, that thought was able to take its stand upon a totally new foundation, from which it was to discover in the heart of man capacities and talents, that guided it to the knowledge of something that was sublimer than all else.  If we contemplate the outward history of the people of Israel, it certainly offers at the first glance little that is attractive; with the exception of some few pleasing features, all the meanness of which men are capable seems concentrated in this one small nation ... in their case no great political sense excuses injustice, no art, no philosophy reconciles us to the horrors of the struggle for existence. Here it was that the negation of the things of this world arose, and with it the vague idea of a higher extra-mundane vocation of mankind. Here men of the people ventured to brand the princes of this earth as "companions of thieves," and to cry out upon the rich, "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth." That was a different conception of right from that of the Romans, to whom nothing seemed more sacred than property. But the curse extended not merely to the mighty, but also to "them that are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight," and likewise to the joyous heroes, who "drink wine," and have chosen the world as their sporting place....Finally the negation becomes a positive principle of life, and the sublimest of prophets suffers on the cross out of love.

***

Through art a new element, a new form of existence, enters into the cosmos....In order to do justice to this view, we must in the first place know exactly what is here meant by "art." When Schiller writes, "Nature has formed creatures only, art has made men," we surely cannot believe that he was thinking here of flute-playing or verse-writing? Let us hear what Schiller says, for an understanding of this fundamental idea is indispensable not merely for the purpose of this chapter, but also for that of the whole book. He writes: ... "What precisely makes him a man is the fact that he does not stand still as mere nature made him, but is endowed with the capacity of retracing with the aid of reason the steps which nature anticipated with him, of transforming the work of necessity into a work of his free choice and of raising the physical necessity to a moral one."...By placing himself "on his aesthetic standpoint," as it were, "outside the world and contemplating it," man for the first time clearly sees this world, the world outside himself! The desire to tear himself away from nature had indeed been a delusion, but it is this very delusion which is now bringing him to a full and proper consciousness of nature: for "man cannot purge the semblance from the real without at the same time freeing the real of the semblance."... It is only when an individual man, like Homer, invents the gods of his own free will as he wishes them to be; it is only when an observer of nature, like Democritus, from free creative power invents the conception of the atom; when a pensive seer, like Plato, with the wilfulness of the genius superior to the world throws overboard all visible nature and puts in its place the realm of ideas that man has created; it is only when a most Sublime Teacher proclaims, "Behold the kingdom of Heaven is within you" -- it is only then that a completely new creature is born, that being of whom Plato says, "He has generative power in his soul rather than in his body," it is only then that the macrocosm contains a microcosm....Compared with all other phenomena of history, Hellenism represents an exuberantly rich blossoming of the human intellect, and the reason of this is that its whole culture rests on an artistic basis.

***

If we consider the civic life of the ants, and see by what daring refinements they ensure the practical efficiency of the social mechanism and the faultless fitting of all parts into each other -- as an example I shall mention only the removal of the baneful sexual impulse in a large percentage of the population, and that too not by mutilation, as is the case with our wretched makeshift castration, but by shrewd manipulation of the fecundating germs -- then we must admit that the civic instinct of man is not of a high standard; compared with many animal species we are nothing but political blunderers.

***

Die! Thou seekest on this earthly ball
In vain, O noble mind, thine element!

***

Rightly understand the driving power of religion, do what it behoves you to further it, and seek to fulfil your duty in this. -- ZOROASTER.

***

In contrast to the new, growing, Anglo-Saxon race, look, for instance, at the Sephardim, the so-called "Spanish Jews"; here we find how a genuine race can by purity keep itself noble for centuries and tens of centuries, but at the same time how very necessary it is to distinguish between the nobly reared portions of a nation and the rest. In England, Holland and Italy there are still genuine Sephardim but very few, since they can scarcely any longer avoid crossing with the Ashkenazim (the so-called "German Jews"). Thus, for example, the Montefiores of the present generation have all without exception married German Jewesses. But every one who has travelled in the East of Europe, where the genuine Sephardim still as far as possible avoid all intercourse with German Jews, for whom they have an almost comical repugnance, will agree with me when I say that it is only when one sees these men and has intercourse with them that one begins to comprehend the significance of Judaism in the history of the word. This is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful figures, noble heads, dignity in speech and bearing. The type is Semitic in the same sense as that of certain noble Syrians and Arabs. That out of the midst of such people Prophets and Psalmists could arise -- that I understood at the first glance, which I honestly confess that I had never succeeded in doing when I gazed, however carefully, on the many hundred young Jews -- "Bochers " -- of the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin. When we study the Sacred Books of the Jews we see further that the conversion of this monopolytheistic people to the ever sublime (though according to our Ideas mechanical and materialistic) conception of a true cosmic monotheism was not the work of the community, but of a mere fraction of the people; indeed this minority had to wage a continuous warfare against the majority, and was compelled to enforce the acceptance of its more exalted view of life by means of the highest Power to which man is heir, the might of personality. As for the rest of the people, unless the Prophets were guilty of gross exaggeration, they convey the impression of a singularly vulgar crowd, devoid of every higher aim, the rich hard and unbelieving, the poor fickle and ever possessed by the longing to throw themselves into the arms of the wretchedest and filthiest idolatry. The course of Jewish history has provided for a peculiar artificial selection of the morally higher section: by banishments, by continual withdrawals to the Diaspora -- a result of the poverty and oppressed condition of the land -- only the most faithful (of the better classes) remained behind, and these abhorred every marriage contract -- even with Jews! -- in which both parties could not show an absolutely pure descent from one of the tribes of Israel and prove their strict orthodoxy beyond all doubt. There remained then no great choice; for the nearest neighbours, the Samaritans, were heterodox, and in the remoter parts of the land, except in the case of the Levites who kept apart, the population was to a large extent much mixed. In this way race was here produced. And when at last the final dispersion of the Jews came, all or almost all of these sole genuine Jews were taken to Spain. The shrewd Romans in fact knew well how to draw distinctions, and so they removed these dangerous fanatics, these proud men, whose very glance made the masses obey, from their Eastern home to the farthest West, while, on the other hand, they did not disturb the Jewish people outside of the narrower Judea more than the Jews of the Diaspora. -- Here, again, we have a most interesting object-lesson on the origin and worth of "race"! For of all the men whom we are wont to characterise as Jews, relatively few are descended from these great genuine Hebrews, they are rather the descendants of the Jews of the Diaspora, Jews who did not take part in the last great struggles; who, indeed, to some extent did not even live through the Maccabean age; these and the poor country people who were left behind in Palestine, and who later in Christian ages were banished or fled, are the ancestors of "our Jews" of to-day. Now whoever wishes to see with his own eyes what noble race is, and what it is not, should send for the poorest of the Sephardim from Salonici or Sarajevo (great wealth is very rare among them, for they are men of stainless honour) and put him side by side with any Ashkenazim financier; then will he perceive the difference between the nobility which race bestows and that conferred by a monarch.

***

In the days of the Roman Republic the influence of the Israelite was already felt. It is strange to read of Cicero, who could thunder out his denunciations of a Catiline, dropping his voice in the law courts when of the Jews he spoke with bated breath lest he should incur their displeasure. In the Middle Ages high offices were conferred by Popes upon Jews, and in Catholic Spain they were even made bishops and archbishops. In France the Jews found the money for the Crusades -- Rudolph of Habsburg exempted them from the ordinary laws.

***

In Christ man awakens to consciousness of his moral calling, but thereby at the same time to the necessity of an inner struggle that is reckoned in tens of centuries. I shall show that after an anti-Christian reaction lasting for many centuries we have with Kant returned again to exactly the same path. The humanitarian Deists of the eighteenth century who turned away from Christ thought the proper course was a "return to nature": on the contrary, it is emancipation from nature, without which we can achieve nothing, but which we are determined to make subject to ourselves.

***

The name Galilee (from Gelil haggoyim) means "district of the heathen." It seems that this part of the country, so far removed from the intellectual centre, had never kept itself altogether pure, even in the earliest times when Israel was still strong and united, and it had served as home for the tribes Naphtali and Zebulon. Of the tribe Naphtali we are told that it was from the first "of very mixed origin," and while the non-Israelitic aborigines continued to dwell in the whole of Palestine as before, this was the case "nowhere in so great a degree as in the northern districts." There was, however, another additional circumstance. While the rest of Palestine remained, owing to its geographical position, isolated as it were from the world, there was, even at the time when the Israelites took possession of the land, a road leading from the lake of Gennesareth to Damascus, and from that point Tyre and Sidon were more accessible than Jerusalem. Thus we find that Solomon ceded a considerable part of this district of the heathen (as it was already called, I Kings, ix. II), with twenty cities to the King of Tyre in payment of his deliveries of cedar- and pine-trees, as well as for the one hundred and twenty hundredweights of gold which the latter had contributed towards the building of the temple; so little interest had the King of Judea in this land, half inhabited as it was by heathens. The Tyrian King Hiram must in fact have found it sparsely populated, as he profited by the opportunity to settle various foreign tribes in Galilee. Then came, as everyone knows, the division into two kingdoms, and since that time, that is, since about a thousand years before Christ (!) only now and again, and then but for a short time, had there been any comparatively close political connection between Galilee and Judea, and it is only this, not community of religious faith, that furthers a fusion of races. In Christ's time, too, Galilee was politically quite separate from Judea, so that it stood to the latter in the relation "of a foreign country." [FN: Further ... we have no right to identify the genuine "Israelites" of the North with the real "Jews" of the South.] In the meantime, however, something had happened, which must have destroyed almost completely for all time the Israelitish character of this northern district: seven hundred and twenty years before Christ (that is about one hundred and fifty years before the Babylonian captivity of the Jews) the northern kingdom of Israel was laid waste by the Assyrians, and its population -- it is said to a man, at all events to a large extent -- deported into different and distant parts of the Empire, where it soon fused with the rest of the inhabitants and in consequence completely disappeared. [FN: So completely disappeared that many theologians, who had leisure, puzzled their brains even in the nineteenth century to discover what had become of the Israelites, as they could not believe that five-sixths of the people to whom Jehovah had promised the whole world should have simply vanished off the face of the earth. An ingenious brain actually arrived at the conclusion that the ten tribes believed to be lost were the English of to-day! He was not at a loss for the moral of this discovery either; in this way the British possess by right five-sixths of the whole earth; the remaining sixth the Jews.] At the same time strange races from remote districts were transported to Palestine to settle there. The authorities indeed suppose (without being able to vouch for it) that a considerable portion of the former mixed Israelitish population had remained in the land; at any rate this remnant did not keep apart from the strangers, but became merged in the medley of races. The fate of these districts was consequently quite different from that of Judea. For when the Judeans at a later time were also led into captivity, their land remained so to speak empty, inhabited only by a few peasants who moreover belonged to the country, so that when they returned from the Babylonian captivity, during which they had kept their race pure, they were able without difficulty to maintain that purity. Galilee, on the other hand, and the neighbouring districts had, as already mentioned, been systematically colonised by the Assyrians, and, as it appears from the Biblical account, from very different parts of that gigantic empire, among others from the northerly mountainous Syria. Then in the centuries before the birth of Christ many Phoenicians and Greeks had also migrated thither. This last fact would lead one to assume that purely Aryan blood also was transplanted thither; at any rate it is certain that a promiscuous mixture of the most different races took place, and that the foreigners in all probability settled in largest numbers in the more accessible and at the same time more fertile Galilee. The Old Testament itself tells with artless simplicity how these strangers originally came to be acquainted with the worship of Jehovah (2 Kings, xvii. 24 ff.): in the depopulated land beasts of prey multiplied; this plague was held to be the vengeance of the neglected "God of the Land" (verse 26); but there was no one who knew how the latter should be worshipped; and so the colonists sent to the King of Assyria and begged for an Israelitish priest from the captivity, and he came and "taught them the manner of the God of the land." In this way the inhabitants of Northern Palestine, from Samaria downward, became Jews in faith, even those of them who had not a drop of Israelitish blood in their veins. In later times many genuine Jews may certainly have settled there; but probably only as strangers in the larger cities, for one of the most admirable characteristics of the Jews -- particularly since their return from captivity where the clearly circumscribed term "Jew" first appears as the designation of a religion (see Zechariah, viii. 23) -- was their care to keep the race pure; marriage between Jew and Galilean was unthinkable. However, even these Jewish elements in the midst of the strange population were completely removed from Galilee not very long before the birth of Christ! It was Simon Tharsi, one of the Maccabeans, who, after a successful campaign in Galilee against the Syrians, "gathered together the Jews who lived there and bade them emigrate and settle bag and baggage in Judea." Moreover the prejudice against Galilee remained so strong among the Jews that, when Herod Antipas during Christ's youth had built the city of Tiberias and tried to get Jews to settle there, neither promises nor threats were of any avail. There is, accordingly, as we see, not the slightest foundation for the supposition that Christ's parents were of Jewish descent.

***

And now follows the profound remark [by Albert Reville, the well-known Professor of Comparative Religions at the College de France]: "The question whether Christ is of Aryan descent is idle. A man belongs to the nation in whose midst he has grown up." This is what people called "science" in the year of grace 1896! To think that at the close of the nineteenth century a professor could still be ignorant that the form of the head and the structure of the brain exercise quite decisive influence upon the form and structure of the thoughts, so that the influence of the surroundings, however great it may be estimated to be, is yet by this initial fact of the physical tendencies confined to definite capacities and possibilities, in other words, has definite paths marked out for it to follow! To think that he could fail to know that the shape of the skull in particular is one of those characteristics which are inherited with ineradicable persistency, so that races are distinguished by craniological measurements, and, in the case of mixed races, the original elements which occur by atavism become still manifest to the investigator! He could believe that the so-called soul has its abode outside the body, and leads the latter like a puppet by the nose. O Middle Ages! when will your night leave us?

***

We are accustomed to regard the Jewish people as the religious people above all others: as a matter of fact in comparison with the Indo-European races it is quite stunted in its religious growth. In this respect what Darwin calls "arrest of development" has taken place in the case of the Jews, an arrest of the growth of the faculties, a dying in the bud. Moreover all the branches of the Semitic stem, though otherwise rich in talents, were extraordinarily poor in religious instinct; this is the "hardheartedness" of which the more important men among them constantly complain. How different the Aryan! Even the oldest documents (which go back far beyond the Jewish) present him to us as earnestly following a vague impulse which forces him to investigate in his own heart. He is joyous, full of animal spirits, ambitious, thoughtless, he drinks and gambles, he hunts and robs; but suddenly he begins to think: the great riddle of existence holds him absolutely spellbound, not, however, as a purely rationalistic problem -- whence is this world? whence came I? questions to which a purely logical and therefore unsatisfactory answer would require to be given -- but as a direct compelling need of life. Not to understand, but to be, that is the point to which he is impelled. Not the past with its litany of cause and effect, but the present, the everlasting present holds his astonished mind spellbound. And he feels that it is only when he has bridged the gulf between himself and all that surrounds him, when he recognises himself -- the one thing that he directly knows -- in every phenomenon and finds again every phenomenon in himself, when he has, so to speak, put the world and himself in harmony, that he can hope to listen with his own ear to the weaving of the everlasting work and hear in his own heart the mysterious music of existence. And in order that he may find this harmony, he utters his own song, tries it in all tones, practises all melodies; then he listens with reverence. And not unanswered is his call: he hears mysterious voices; all nature becomes alive, everything in her that is related to man begins to stir. He sinks in reverence upon his knees, does not fancy that he is wise, does not believe that he knows the origin and finality of the world, yet has faint forebodings of a loftier vocation, discovers in himself the germ of immeasurable destinies, "the seed of immortality." This is, however, no mere dream, but a living conviction, a faith, and like everything living, it in its turn begets life. The heroes of his race and his holy men he sees as "supermen" (as Goethe says) hovering high above the earth; he wills to be like them, for he too is impelled onward and upward, and now he knows from what a deep inner well they drew the strength to be great. -- Now this glance into the unfathomable depths of his own soul, this longing to soar upwards, this is religion. Religion has primarily nothing to do either with superstition or with morals; it is a state of mind. And because the religious man is in direct contact with a world beyond reason, he is thinker and poet: he appears consciously as a creator; he toils unremittingly at the noble Sisyphus work of giving visible shape to the Invisible, of making the Unthinkable capable of being thought; we never find with him a hard and fast chronological cosmogony and theogony, he has inherited too lively a feeling of the Infinite for that; his conceptions remain in flux and never grow rigid; old ones are replaced by new; gods, honoured in one century, are in another scarcely known by name. Yet the great facts of knowledge, once firmly acquired, are never again lost, and more than all that fundamental truth which the Rigveda centuries and centuries before Christ tried thus to express, "The root of existence, the wise found in the heart" -- a conviction which in the nineteenth century has been almost identically expressed by Goethe: Ist nicht der Kern der Natur, Menschen im Herzen? That is religion!

Now this very tendency, this state of mind, this instinct, "to seek the core of nature in the heart," the Jews lack to a startling degree. They are born rationalists. Reason is strong in them, the will enormously developed, their imaginative and creative powers, on the other hand, peculiarly limited. Their scanty mythically religious conceptions, indeed even their commandments, customs and ordinances of worship, they borrowed without exception from abroad, they reduced everything to a minimum which they kept rigidly unaltered; the creative element, the real inner life is almost totally wanting in them; at the best it bears, in relation to the infinitely rich religious life of the Aryans, which includes all the highest thought and poetical invention of these peoples, like the lingual sounds referred to above, a ratio of 2 to 7. Consider what a luxuriant growth of magnificent religious conceptions and ideas, and in addition, what art and philosophy, thanks to the Greeks and Teutonic races, sprang up upon the soil of Christianity and then ask with what images and thoughts the so-called religious nation of the Jews has in the same space of time enriched mankind!...

Goethe, who is often called the "great Heathen," but who might with greater justice be termed the "great Aryan," ... said, "Animated inquiry into cause does great harm." Similarly the German natural scientist of to-day says, "In the Infinite no new end and no beginning can be sought. However far back we set the origin, the question still remains open as to the first of the first, the beginning of the beginning." The Jew felt quite differently. He knew as accurately about the creation of the world as do the wild Indians of South America or the Australian blacks to-day. That, however, was not due -- as is the case with these -- to want of enlightenment, but to the fact that the Aryan shepherd's profound, melancholy mark of interrogation was never allowed a place in Jewish literature; his tyrannous will forbade it, and it was the same will that immediately silenced by fanatical dogmatism the scepticism that could not fail to assert itself among so gifted a people (see the Kohelelh, or Book of the Preacher). Whoever would completely possess the "to-day" must also grasp the "yesterday" out of which it grew. Materialism suffers shipwreck as soon as it is not consistent; the Jew was taught that by his unerring instinct; and just as accurately as our materialists know to-day how thinking arises out of the motion of atoms, did he know how God had created the world and made man from a clod of earth. Creation, however, is the least thing of all; the Jew took the myths with which he became acquainted on his journeys, stripped them as far as possible of everything mythological and pruned them down to concrete historical events. But then, and not till then, came his masterpiece: from the scanty material common to all Semites the Jew constructed a whole history of the world of which he made himself the centre; and from this moment, that is, the moment when Jehovah makes the covenant with Abraham, the fate of Israel forms the history of the world, indeed, the history of the whole cosmos, the one thing about which the Creator of the world troubles himself. It is as if the circles always became narrower; at last only the central point remains -- the "Ego," the will has prevailed. That indeed was not the work of a day; it came about gradually; genuine Judaism, that is, the Old Testament in its present form, shaped and established itself only after the return of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity. And now what formerly had been effected with unconscious genius was applied and perfected consciously: the union of the past and the future with the present in such a way that each individual moment formed a centre on the perfectly straight path, which the Jewish people had to follow and from which it henceforth could not deviate either to right or to left....

 The Jew lived only in history, to him the "heathen" idea of morality and sanctity was strange, since he knew only a "law," and moreover obeyed this law for quite practical reasons, namely, to stay the wrath of God and to make sure of his future, and so he judged a phenomenon like the revelation of Christ from a purely historical standpoint, and became justly filled with fury, when the promised kingdom, to win which he had suffered and endured for centuries -- for the sake of possessing which he had separated himself from all people upon the earth, and had become hated and despised of all -- when this kingdom, in which he hoped to see all nations in fetters and all princes upon their knees "licking the dust," was all at once transformed from an earthly kingdom into one "not of this world." And now, to crown all, this Galilean heterodoxy! To plant the flag of idealism on this ancient consecrated seat of the most obstinate materialism! To transform, as if by magic, the God of vengeance and of war into a God of love and peace! To teach the stormy will, that stretched out both hands for all the gold of the world, that it should throw away what it possessed and seek the hidden treasure in its own heart! ...

We see what an important element of faith the will is. While the Aryan, rich in cognition, "flies to search in distant realms," the strong-willed Jew makes God pitch His tent once for all in his own midst. The power of his will to live has not only forged for the Jew an anchor of faith, which holds him fast to the ground of historical tradition, but it has also inspired him with unshakable confidence in a personal, directly present God, who is almighty to give and to destroy; and it has brought him, the man, into a moral relation to this God, in that God in His all-powerfulness issued commands, which man is free to follow or neglect.

There is another matter which must not be omitted in this connection: the one-sided predominance of the will makes the chronicles of the Jewish people in general dreary and ugly; and yet in this atmosphere there grew up a series of important men, whose peculiar greatness makes it impossible to compare them with other intellectual heroes. In the introduction to this division I have already spoken of those "disavowers" of the Jewish character, who themselves remained the while such out and out Jews, from the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet, that they contributed more than anything else to the growth of the most rigid Hebraism; in chap. v. I shall return to them; only so much must here be said: these men, in grasping religious materialism by its most abstract side, raised it morally to a very great height; their work has paved the way historically in essential points for Christ's view of the relation between God and man. Moreover, an important feature, which is essentially rooted in Judaism, shows itself most clearly in them: the historical religion of this people lays emphasis not upon the individual, but upon the whole nation; the individual can benefit or injure the whole community, but otherwise he is of little moment; from this resulted of necessity a markedly socialistic feature which the Prophets often powerfully express. The individual who attains to prosperity and wealth, while his brothers starve, falls under the ban of God. While Christ in one way represents exactly the opposite principle, namely, that of extreme individualism, the redeeming of the individual by regeneration, His life and His teaching, on the other hand, point unmistakably to a condition of things which can only be realised by having all things common. The communism of "one flock and one shepherd" is certainly different from the entirely politically coloured, theocratic communism of the Prophets; but here again the basis is solely and characteristically Jewish....

Here, however, we can and must ask with Christ, "But if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?" ... how shall we, above all, be able to sift and separate from the "bread of life" this specifically Jewish element which is so threateningly perilous to our spirit, if the revelation of Christ does not stand conspicuously before our eyes in its general outlines, and if we are not able clearly to distinguish in this image the purely personal from its historical conditions.

***

It is all very fine to roast one's enemies in ovens -- from China to the artistic Netherlands of the sixteenth century where do we not find cruelty?

***

Fearful, too, are the many precepts in the Talmud concerning the persecution and the destruction of the unorthodox Jews: how individuals are to be stoned and the people executed with the sword, and still more frightful are the descriptions of the tortures and executions which this equally dismal and spiritless book expatiates upon with pleasure; here too only one example: "The criminal is placed in dirt up to the knees; a hard cloth is then laid in a soft one and wrapped round his neck; the one witness pulls the one end towards himself and the other the other, till the prisoner opens his mouth. In the meantime the lead is heated and poured into his mouth so that it enters his vitals and burns them up" (Sanhedrin, fol. 52a). Then there are learned discussions about such things in the Talmud, thus the extremely pious Rabbi Jehuda thinks it would be advisable to open the poor man's mouth with pincers and to pour the lead down quickly, otherwise he might die of strangulation and then his soul would not be consumed with his body. This is what one comes to with "the subjection of the feelings to the reason!"

***
It redounds to the honour of the Germans to have hated Christianity!

***

Julius Caesar at once recognised not only the military prowess but also the unexampled loyalty of the Teutons and hired from among them as many cavalrymen as he could possibly get. In the battle of Pharsalus, which was so decisive for the history of the world, they fought for him; the Romanised Gauls had abandoned their commander in the hour of need, the Germanic troops proved themselves as faithful as they were brave. This loyalty to a master chosen of their own free will is the most prominent feature in the Germanic character; from it we can tell whether pure Germanic blood flows in the veins or not....Karl Lamprecht has written so beautifully about this great fundamental characteristic of loyalty in its historical significance that I should reproach myself if I did not quote him here. He has just spoken of the "retainers" who in the old German State pledge themselves to their chief to be true unto death and prove so, and then he adds: "In the formation of this body of retainers we see one of the most magnificent features of the specifically Germanic view of life, the feature of loyalty. Not understood by the Roman but indispensable to the Teuton, the need of loyalty existed even at that time, that ever-recurring German need of closest personal attachment, of complete devotion to each other, perfect community of hopes, efforts and destinies. Loyalty never was to our ancestors a special virtue, it was the breath of life of everything good and great; upon it rested the feudal State of the Early and the co-operative system of the Later Middle Ages, and who could conceive the military monarchy of the present day without loyalty?....

However true and beautiful every word that Lamprecht has here written, I do not think that he has made quite clear the "primary source." Loyalty, though distinguishing the Teutons from mongrel races, is not altogether a specific Germanic trait. One finds it in almost all purely bred races, nowhere more than among the negroes, for example, and -- I would ask -- what man could be more faithful than the noble dog? No, in order to reveal that "primary source of Germanicism," we must show what is the nature of this Germanic loyalty, and we can only succeed in doing so if we have grasped the fact that freedom is the intellectual basis of the whole Germanic nature. For the characteristic feature of this loyalty is its free self-determination. The human character resembles the nature of God as the theologians represent it: complex and yet indiscernible, an inseparable unity. This loyalty and this freedom do not grow the one out of the other, they are two manifestations of the same character which reveals itself to us on one occasion more from the intellectual on another more from the moral side. The negro and the dog serve their masters, whoever they may be: that is the morality of the weak, or, as Aristotle says, of the man who is born to be a slave; the Teuton chooses his master, and his loyalty is therefore loyalty to himself: that is the morality of the man who is born free....

One thing is certain: if we wish to sum up in a single word the historic greatness of the Teuton -- always a perilous undertaking, since everything living is of Protean nature -- we must name his loyalty. That is the central point from which we can survey his whole character, or better, his personality. But we must remember that this loyalty is not the primary source, as Lamprecht thinks, not the root but the blossom -- the fruit by which we recognise the tree. Hence it is that this loyalty is the finest touchstone for distinguishing between genuine and false Germanicism; for it is not by the roots but by the fruit that we distinguish the species; we should not forget that with unfavourable weather many a tree has no blossoms or only poor ones, and this often happens in the case of hard-pressed Teutons. The root of their particular character is beyond all doubt that power of imagination which is common to all Aryans and peculiar to them alone and which appeared in greatest luxuriance among the Hellenes. I spoke of this in the beginning of the chapter on Hellenic art and philosophy; from that root everything springs, art, philosophy, politics, science; hence, too, comes the peculiar sap which tinges the flower of loyalty. The stem then is formed by the positive strength -- the physical and the intellectual, which can never be separated; in the case of the Romans, to whom we owe the firm bases of family and State, this stem was powerfully developed. But the real blossoms of such a tree are those which mind and sentiment bring to maturity. Freedom is an expansive power which scatters men, Germanic loyalty is the bond which by its inner power binds men more closely than the fear of the tyrant's sword: freedom signifies thirst after direct self-discovered truth, loyalty the reverence for that which has appeared to our ancestors to be true; freedom decides its own destiny and loyalty holds that decision unswervingly and for ever. Loyalty to the loved one, to friend, parents, and fatherland we find in many places; but here, in the case of the Teuton, something is added, which makes the great instinct become a profoundly deep spiritual power, a principle of life. Shakespeare represents the father giving his son as the best advice for his path through life, as the one admonition which includes all others, these words: This above all: to thine own self be true! The principle of Germanic loyalty is evidently not the necessity of attachment, as Lamprecht thinks, but on the contrary the necessity of constancy within a man's own autonomous circle; self-determination testifies to it; in it freedom proves itself; by it the vassal, the member of the guild, the official, the officer asserts his independence. For the free man, to serve means to command himself....Therefore it is that Goethe writes: "Loyalty preserves personality!" Germanic loyalty is the girdle that gives immortal beauty to the ephemeral individual, it is the sun without which no knowledge can ripen to wisdom, the charm which alone bestows upon the free individual's passionate action the blessing of permanent achievement.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain